Apologies - It's dawned on me that mentioning the anti ethanol saga around Queensland's sugar industry of the 70s, 80s as something to compare to all the on paper noise of heading down the path of nuclear fission reactors for power generation, would be lost on everyone here and needs a brief explanation.

It's actually a good example of noise (the Kelly report -1977) but it along with other BS was an effective tool for near 20 years, to scupper any calls to go the way of Brazil and their ethanol industry - hopefully providing a cheaper fuel than the rather expensive fuel esp North Queenslanders were stuck with. In the end though, the whole idea of diversifying became moot due to the industry subscribing to being locked in by the sugar futures market.

From the late 70 to mid 90s in Queensland, every time the prospect was raised that the industry should diversify into ethanol production, as raw cane prices were at the time sending some farmers to the poor house, such ideas were met with proof from involved studies, one in particular was the Kelly report [1] [2] that proved ethanol was not worthwhile.

By the mid 90s I think if anyone referred back to the Kelly report, in hindsight it's quite laughable, especially just looking over the first seven pages in regard to some of the assumptions their findings were based on. (Things like it might take a million people ... lol) I think a lot of people in the industry at the time took it at face value and just accepted that it would be fairly accurate given some pretty clever people had worked on it. However since I'd seen a couple of stills in action I knew it had to be BS and was a pet peeve of mine for a long time. Eventually I found a simple but effective thought experiment which took about 5 to 10 minutes to run though, it ran a comparison to a pre existing cane milling area to the petroleum industry, each step of generating the oil and fuel, compared back to a similar step in regard to a hypothetical ethanol plant sitting beside the cane mill - it was obvious that each step involving cane was far far cheaper, but at the end I'd ask how legitimate is some study that stated it cost more per unit, than what the oil refiners were receiving pre tax ... I eventually had the privilege of running the thought experiment with some of the more influential people in Queensland's sugar industry representing the state's grower base, it of course had no argument and was I thought received well and intriguing to them, with one mentioning it didn't really matter so much any more due to the obligations the cane industry had in regard to sugar contracts. However I'd guess they must have gone back and had a look at the actual ancient reports, as from that time on, as far as I can recall, the sugar industry media releases never used those BS reports again, as a basis for not going ahead with ethanol production.

Summing up, reports and studies are what they are, and we should understand at times there are those that don't see the forest for the trees ... some are for whatever reason, are standing right up against a tree.

[1] https://digitalcollections.qut.edu.au/1472/ [Description page for pdf but doesn't mention its 239 pages]

[2] https://digitalcollections.qut.edu.au/1472/1/A_Feasibility_S... [pdf]